Sunday 14 February 2016

Moseley on Marx and Money.


Fred Moseley (professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College) has launched "Money and Totality. A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx's Logic in Capital and the End of the 'Transformation Problem'." (h/t davidmfields @ URPE):
"From the nineteen century until today, Marx’s critics have rejected his theory on the grounds that the Volume 3 account of prices of production contradicts the analysis of labor time values in Volume 1. Marx’s defenders have responded by attempting to 'transform' labor values into prices of production in ways that avoid this criticism and enable some of Marx’s key claims to still be affirmed. In this brilliant book Moseley provides extensive textual evidence from all the drafts of Capital that neither critics nor advocates have adequately understood Marx’s methodological framework. Marx’s project was not to transform labor values into prices of production; Capital is a monetary theory from beginning to end. The same money quantities are first comprehended on an aggregate level, and then on a more concrete level where differences among sectors are taken into account. Moseley provides elegant algebraic proofs that all of Marx’s key claims can be established within this framework. This book may well overcome the obsession with the 'transformation problem' once and for all, moving debates about Marx’s theory onto more fruitful paths. It is surely one of the most important contributions to Marxian scholarship published in our time."
Tony Smith, Iowa State University

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